David Blanchflower, professor of
economics at Dartmouth College and a former policy maker at the
Bank of England, was on Bloomberg earlier, discussing the flawed ECB decision to hike rates by 25 bps, just a day after Portugal went bankrupt, and calling it quite right, "a pretty big mistake." Blanchflower understandably compares today's move to the ill-fated hike in 2008 when the ECB was forced to promptly reverse course and loosen substantially when the bottom fell out of the market, although in reality today's situation is nothing like 2008 when one accounts for the EFSF which is essentially a Central Bank within a Central Bank: a pseudo pre-funded SPV whose only job is to provide liquidity to those countries in the block who are insolvent (and in the process keeping peripheral inflation rampant), while at the same time tightening liquidity in the core. In essence the ECB has been split in two: a good central bank and a bad central bank. The problem is the funding for the bad central bank is contingent on Germany which is becoming increasingly disenchanted with the whole failed Euro experiment, yet which is unable to leave the EUR since the DEM would surge by orders of magnitude to account for the country's strong economy, thereby burying the export sector. That in a nutshell is the summary of the tensions in Europe. And yes, Blanchflower is spot on that this house of cards construct held together by spit, superglue and prayer will all fall apart very soon.